Here is the third ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon a few months ago. I’m a little embarrassed that it took this long for me to sit down and type it all up. The first part can be found here, and the second here. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel...

There’s a long-running argument about whether publishers consider readers to be their true “customers”. It’s probably rooted in the way that, before e-books came along and changed the market, middle-man distributors were how publishers sold the vast majority of their books. With the exception of things like order forms in the back of paperbacks, publishers didn’t need to worry about how to sell books to readers—the stores those middle-men turned around and sold books to handled that. They could concentrate on selling books to the middle-men instead and not think about the reader except in terms of making their products as...

John Scalzi makes a series of posts on his blog called “The Big Idea”, in which he lets an author discuss their latest works. Lately, he has gotten fed up with people leaving comments on these posts saying that they won’t buy the book because the e-book is too expensive. He posted to his blog today announcing that he would be deleting any such comments he came across from now on, Scalzi writes: I think it’s important to understand that eBooks are not special snowflakes; they’re just books in electronic form. As someone who prefers to...

The Wall Street Journal article on e-book sticker shock that we covered a couple of days ago has been drawing a number of reactions. CBS Marketwatch offers a piece noting that the high e-book prices are slowing the growth of the industry. It points out that e-book prices have implications for e-reader prices, too, because consumers won’t want to pay high prices for an e-reader if they’re going to have to pay a lot for the books, too. The question is who gets hurt worse. According to the Journal, both Amazon and industry executives claim that...

Perhaps it’s a sign of how the digitization of media has changed the marketplace that its misuse can be interjected into a complaint over the pricing of traditional media—and misinterpreted. A complaint by Elvis Costello that his record company is pricing his new album too high has been interpreted by BoingBoing and Techdirt to mean he thinks fans should pirate the album. However, the evidence on the site suggests this interpretation is not quite accurate. On the 18th, Costello posted an entry to his blog entitled “Steal This Record.” decrying the price of over $200 for his...

Mike Shatzkin has another fascinating essay in which he goes into detail about how e-books are priced by various actors in the e-book publishing industry. He explains that the break between agency pricing and non-agency pricing creates two separate standards—the “digital retail price” (of which agency vendors take 30% and are not allowed to change), and the “suggested retail price” (which is usually close to the cost of the lowest print version, and agency vendors pay half of to the publisher but can then choose to mark down for their own sales). The non-agency publishers who sell to Apple are obliged...

Over the last few days, MainStreet did another one of those pricing breakdowns of components for the $79 ad-supported Kindle e-reader, and ended up determining the device costs just over $84 to make, therefore Amazon will be selling each unit at a $5 loss (at least). It’s being widely reported in a number of places, but I have to say I’m frankly rather skeptical. I reported a couple of months ago on a price estimate for the Kindle Fire that claimed Amazon was losing $50 on each unit. Then other estimates suggested it was losing $10, and another said...

Sam Harris has posted a rather provocative entry to his blog discussing the problem faced by writers in an era when audiences “increasingly expect digital content to be free” and have such short attention spans that increasingly full-length books are seeming just too long. It’s a topsy-turvy world, Harris posits, when people with popular blogs get so many hits that publishing it in even a famous and well-regarded magazine like Vanity Fair is “tantamount to burying their work” by comparison. He cites as example an article by his friend Christopher Hitchens, whose numbers of Facebook likes and Twitter...

TeleRead reader Felix Torres originally posted this as a comment to my earlier story, but I felt it was so cogent and well-written it deserved promotion to the front page. –CM Yes, Kindle’s new baseline pricing is a serious problem to competitors. But it’s actually bigger than it looks. Beyond the unreachable advertised prices, an added problem for competitors is that the subsidized Kindles aren’t just flashing ads, but offering up discount coupons. If it were just ads, it would be easy to sign up with Google or Microsoft to feed banner ads to their connected...

Yesterday, perhaps hoping to stage a preemptive strike on Amazon, Barnes & Noble announced a new cooperative venture with self-publisher Lulu.com, which is supposed to make it easier for Lulu customers to get their books published as Nook e-books. However, given that B&N was already partnering with Lulu on self-publishing e-books, it is entirely unclear how it was harder before and how it will be easier now. And this bright bundle of glittering generalities does not seem to have helped in the end. Barnes & Noble’s stock was down by as much as 13% after Amazon’s Kindle announcement today,...

One of our posts mentioned and quoted a little of this story from the Economist last week, but upon actually reading the story I found a number of interesting points that bear consideration on their own. First, of course, is the whole “Ikea predicts the death of paper books” thing, which The Economist extrapolated from hearing that Ikea is introducing a new deeper version of its “Billy” bookshelves, meant for displaying stuff that wasn’t actually books. (It turns out this actually wasn’t true; the original 11” Billy will continue to be stocked right alongside the 15” deep version;...

Here is the second ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the final part in days to come. The first part can be found here. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conanmovie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar. In this segment, we discuss piracy, e-book pricing, editing, and the “Storyteller’s Bowl”...